Keynote talks you will remember!

Young American Alexis Ohanian talks about embracing your users and the need for evangelists to spread the message through organic traffic. He encourages audience members to go above and beyond when interacting with their users by making their experience memorable, weird, fascinating. TechCrunch calls Alexis "one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech." He co-founded reddit, and launched hipmunk. He also Founded Breadpig, which creates geeky things, sells them, and gives away all the profits-- $180,000 so far. He Gave a TED talk at age 26 about a whale named Mr. Splashy Pants. In his own words, "If you're not developing for the end user, who the hell are you developing for? Whenever you launch a new product, you've got to convince every single person who sees it that it's worth their time. Keep this in mind when making decisions about product. Less is more and if it's not immediately compelling, you've lost a potential user -- the back button is your enemy. Fortunately, most software does such a terrible job with user experience that there are loads of markets ripe for disruption. You can win on design alone (see: hipmunk.com, seatgeek.com, instagram to name a few)"

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including most recently The Productive Programmer. Proficient in numerous languages, his primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is an acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. In his keynote, he will tease apart some of the tangled abstractions that have become so common in computer science that they are invisible, yet impact important decisions we as programmers make, addressing tools, all the way down to fundamental concepts.

Dan North writes software and helps people and organisations adopt agile and lean methods.He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, which is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right," and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, and understanding how we communicate and learn.

Over the last year or so Dan has been studying and talking about patterns of effective software delivery. Many of these require us to embrace uncertainty, and it turns out we are desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty. So much so that we will replace it with anything, even things we know don’t work.In this talk he explains why Embracing Uncertainty is the most fundamental effectiveness pattern of all, and offers advice to help make uncertainty less scary. He is pretty sure he won’t succeed.

Jeff Atwood believes “the best developers are always learning”, and part of that learning process comes through teaching. In 2008, he and a handful of developers built stackoverflow.com, using the beta version of ASP.NET MVC. 2 years later, it is one of the top 500 sites on the internet. A synthesis of wiki, blog, forum, and Digg/Reddit, Stack Overflow is a free programming Q & A site, collaboratively built and maintained by fellow programmers. Programmers are not exactly known for being a social bunch, and yet, Stack Overflow counts over 140,000 registered users today, who have asked and answered almost 2 million questions. In this talk, Jeff Atwood will share his experience designing Stack Overflow, making social software for the anti-social.

Through our friends at Media Evolution, we have gotten turned onto the super-musings of a young and brilliant thinker named Amber Case. Amber is a gifted orator who, with poise and humour, will illuminate us with her genuine fascination of cyborg anthropology and how the field can be applied to interface design. Together time well spent. @caseorganic

2011: Enter Userverse

Hey you! Yes you! What have you done for the end-user today?

This year Øredev gives you the opportunity to step away from the keyboard and think about who you really work for. We are not speaking about the people you work with in your project, like the architect, designer, manager, nor even the customer, we are speaking about the end-user.

Developers know it: the satisfaction of the end-user is key.

But sometimes the idea gets lost in the feedback loop, the complexity, the beauty of a technology, or the immensity of the project. Sometimes, the developer is simply kept away from knowing who he/she codes for. Although sometimes, in the short run, the fastest way to customer satisfaction, praise and a raise is to focus on what your boss and customer wants, what REALLY fulfils your boss and customer's expectations in the long run is the end-user's satisfaction.

Developers who know who their end-user is and have the ability to communicate about them with the customer have a huge advantage. That way they can work from an end-user’s perspective and have fun, open up new possibilities, making an end product that not only spares frustration, but that can work faster and can be the secret to making the magic happen. Our world is not flat, put your code into perspective, enter userverse.